1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a picture switching apparatus and, particularly, to a picture switching apparatus for use in a picture display system which reads video data from a recording medium such as a video CD (compact disc) or a photo CD recorded with coded and compressed video data in file unit and decodes and plays it, for executing a fade-out/fade-in processing at a juncture between accesses to files.
2. Description of the Related Art
An AV (audio-visual) system capable of simultaneously reproducing a picture and sound from a video CD or a photo CD which is a variation of an audio dedicated CD has recently being popularized as a Karaoke system, etc.
Further, in concomitance with the era of true multi-media, the DVD (digital video disc) standards have been set and various AV systems compatible with the DVD have being developed.
Video data of respective scenes and sound data corresponding to the respective scenes are compressed by the MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) system and recorded in discrete files of such disc and, when the video data is to be reproduced by an AV system, the video data is reproduced by accessing the respective files successively or selectively and decoding a data stream of the video data thus read out.
Since, in the above mentioned system, the access is executed in file unit, a scene related to a file is abruptly displayed on a screen having a picture of a scene related to a preceding being disappeared due to completion of reproducing and display of the scene, resulting in a very unnatural switching of scene.
Although the problem of unnaturalness of scene switching may be solved by employing in a header portion and an end portion of each file coded video data obtained by fade-out processing and a fade-in processing, respectively, the fade-in and fade-out processing of an original video data in every file is very complicated and requires a modification of the original video data.
When a search mode is instructed for a specific file assigned, an operation of the system is shifted to an access of the specific file after an access to a preceding file which is currently being played is ended in the course of a playing. Therefore, while a picture related to a next file is played through the fade-in processing, the picture of the file which is currently being played is ended suddenly.